NY Times on syphilis

As you might expect from an Army museum and a pathology institute, we have a lot of photographs of syphilis (and yaws, a related disease). Here's the NY Times on the natural history of the disease:

Essay
A Great Pox’s Greatest Feat: Staying Alive
By MARLENE ZUK
Published: April 29, 2008
Research indicates that syphilis became less virulent over time, which probably helped it survive.

Veterinary Corps again

Some time ago I wrote about Greg Krenzelok's Veterinary Corps website, where he's devoted considerable time to documenting the role horses played in World War 1. To help him out a bit, we've been feeding him pictures from our collection and he's been putting them on his page. He's made a separate section for our pictures and has given us some really nice credit, as well as giving the link to this blog. Take a look at his site; it's truly a labor of love.

June 11: Mitch Yockelson's World War 1 book lecture

My old colleague Mitch Yockelson (if I can use that term when we were both Archives Techs) is speaking at National Archives Building, Constitution Ave., between 7th & 9th Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20408 US on Wednesday, June 11, at 12:00PM

He's celebrating the publication of his new book: Borrowed Soldiers: Americans Under British Command 1918 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). A discussion of the book will be held in the National Archives McGowan Theater and a reception and book signing will follow. Use Special Events entrance on Constitution Ave.

I'd encourage anyone interested in military history to stop by. Later in the year, Mitch will be speaking at the Medical Museum specifically on the medical part of the story.

Anatomical Theatre: Medical Museum Images

Came across this nice set of images (click on gallery) done by Joanna Ebenstein, a New York-based photographer and designer, during a one-month pilgrimage to medical museums in England, Scotland, Hungary, Italy, Austria, The Netherlands, and the United States. Wax models, wet specimens, skeletal specimens...and is that Brian's arm I see?

Body Worlds vs. Bodies - the Exhibition

Bodies was on display in Arlington a few months back; and Body Worlds is up in Baltimore now. Our colleagues at Biomedicine on display have a couple of blog posts on what they thought of the exhibits - here and here.

Should you trust this blog?

Ehh, maybe. See "Can You Handle It? Better Yet: Do You Know It When You See It?," by Monica Hesse, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, April 27, 2008; Page M01, for a good discussion of online information versus knowledge.

Poison Gas

Earlier this week wired.com ran an article on the 93rd anniversary of the first use of poison gas on the Western Front in World War 1, when the Germans used chlorine gas against French and Algerian troops. The article said that chlorine gas produces a green cloud and a strong odor, giving the victims at least a little advance warning. This made me think of posters we have from World War 2 that warn soldiers of the different smells that gases produce (although I neither know nor wish to know what flypaper smells like):

Medical technology creates ethical dilemmas. Again

Read about left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) in "Heart Pump Creates Life-Death Ethical Dilemmas," By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, April 24, 2008; A01. Once one of these is implanted in someone, their heart can't fail. I'm pretty sure we don't have any of these devices in the museum yet.

National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine division announces websites

The Bathtub Collection!

Two new websites from HMD

The History of Medicine Division of the NLM is pleased to announce two new websites focusing on the Bathtub collection and genealogical resources.

NLM is home to numerous biographical and genealogical resources for those seeking information about ancestors with medical or health related training. Among these is the AMA Deceased Physicians Card File, a collection of nearly 400,000 index cards created by the AMA between about 1901 and 1969 focusing on everyone in the U.S. who received a medical degree. The cards were updated throughout the physician's career with information about degrees obtained, licensing, addresses and finally cause of death and sometimes obituary citations and even portraits. Please visit the site at:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/genealogy/

The Bathtub collection consists of fragments found in the old and rare bindings of the NLM's rare book collection when items were rebound and conserved in the 1940s and 1950s. It is called the "Bathtub Collection" because then-curator Dorothy Schullian took the leftovers of conservation work home and soaked them in her bathtub to retrieve the often interesting bits and pieces of medieval manuscripts and early
printed ephemera she found. Please visit the site at:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/bathtub/


Actually the Bathtub Collection sounds like one person made the best of a bad conservation plan...

Southern California Medical Museum exhibit on quackery

See "Medical quackery gets airing at California Medical Museum," By MELANIE LADONGA, The Press-Enterprise April 24, 2008.

The Southern California Medical Museum sounds like a traditional small medical museum - "Medical artifact collections on display include surgical kits from the Civil War up to World War II and battlefield amputation kits, syringes and poison bottles. A collection of thermometers includes a thermometer made of gold that is more than 100 years old."

This is outside my usual stomping ground, but I'd stop in if possible.

Tours of Forest Glen Seminary, formerly part of Walter Reed

From World War 2 until the 1990s, Walter Reed owned and used the National Park Seminary girl's school buildings at Forest Glen, MD. They didn't maintain the buildings well; around 1989 or so I rescued a post-Works Project Administration mural of the Seminary by Jack McMillan which showed orange jumpsuited psychiatric patients on the grounds. It was being damaged by water leaking down from 3 floors above. The painting is restored and on display in the Museum; in the meantime, you can take tours of the buildings as explained in this article "At an Old Retreat, Signs of Renewal," by Amy Orndorff, Washington Post Friday, April 25, 2008; Page WE05 (which is not quite factual - the theater burned down). There's two photographs on the site as well.

A few points of interest - the fountain, which was badly damaged the last time I saw it, was a sixteenth century work imported from Italy if I remember correctly. Also the ballroom in the main building was restored and is stunning, although a lot of the busts that lined it are missing.

The place is well worth seeing. It's being turned into condos now.

Susan L. Smith on WWII Mustard Gas Experiments

Lecture at NYAM: Susan L. Smith on WWII Mustard Gas Experiments

This year, the New York Academy of Medicine's Public Lecture Series in the History of Medicine and Public Health has been looking at some new aspects of the history of medicine in wartime - specifically, the interplay between war, medicine and society. Our series explores the poisonous ideologies that fester into wars, and the development and testing of deadly new weapons to fight them; the social and
infrastructural stresses and fractures war brings; and the challenges of helping war's maimed and damaged soldiers find peaceful occupations when the fighting is over.

The series concludes next month with Susan L. Smith's look at human experimentation in the context of global war.

Thursday, May , 8, 2008, 6:00 PM with reception at 5:30 PM The Lilianna Sauter Lecture Medicine in Wartime, Part IV: Place, Health and War: World War II Mustard Gas Experiments in Transnational Perspective Susan L. Smith, University of Alberta


In the early 1940s, medical scientists funded by the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service conducted painful mustard gas experiments on at least 60,000 American soldiers. The Allies, including the governments of Canada, Britain, Australia, and the United States, conducted these experiments on their own soldiers in order to identify the impact of chemical weapons on the health of soldiers. One component of the research program involved examining how mustard gas affected men of various "races." At least eight separate experimental programs in the United States focused specifically on Japanese American and African American soldiers and one focused on testing Puerto Ricans on an island off Panama. The researchers were searching for evidence of race-based differences in the responses of the human body to mustard gas exposure. In the 1940s in a climate of contested beliefs over the existence and meanings of racial differences, medical researchers examined the bodies of these specific minority groups for evidence of how they differed from whites.

Susan L. Smith is a Professor of History and Classics at the University of Alberta specializing in the history of health and medicine. Her current reserach focuses on race, health, and war. She is the author of two books on race and health in the United States, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 and Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, and Health
Politics, 1880-1950.

To register for this event, visit : https://www.nyam.org/events/nyam_register.php?id=375


For more information about NYAM programs in the history of medicine, visit our website at http://www.nyam.org/histmed , write history@nyam.org , or call 212.822.7310.

Historical programs at NYAM are supported by the Friends of the Rare Book Room. Please join the Friends! Download a membership form at http://www.nyam.org/initiatives/docs/FRBR_Renewal.pdf .


THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 1216 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10029

Former Curator Jeff Reznick at Book Festival

Jeff Reznick writes in to tell us about an opportunity talk to him and buy his World War I medical history books (which you can learn more about by clicking on the two pictures):

"This Sunday, April 27, the town of Kensington, Maryland will celebrate The International Day of the Book with a street festival on Howard Avenue in Old Town Kensington. I am excited to be one of nearly five-dozen local authors participating in the event.

Copies of my first book will be on display alongside flyers promoting my new book, which is due out early next year from Manchester University Press/ Palgrave Macmillan.

You can learn more about Kensington's Day of the Book Festival here
http://www.dayofthebook.com/
.

Links, links, and more links (actually, just four links tonight)

A few links for you, on this warm spring Tuesday evening:

• Morbid Anatomy offers some most excellent linkage to something called "The Spitzner Museum's Wax Woman," by Francoise Riviere and Andreas Martens. It's described as a comic book, which I am sure is going to get the attention of one of our staff.
• An outstanding syndicated travel column featured the Museum. Thanks!
• Revealed links to some details about a catalog for a previous exhibit at the Duke University Museum of Art entitled "The Physician’s Art."
• And Street Anatomy brings the funny when they offer a link to Panexa.

Enjoy!

Museums on the Web

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year's Museums and the Web conference, which this year took place in Montreal, Canada. This was my first visit to Montreal, and I was able to visit a few of the local sites, and you're invited to see a few of those photos on this Flickr stream.

Much is made everyday of the impact the Internet is having on our lives, and that impact is just as acutely felt in the museum world as any place else. MW2008 was about how institutions large and small and from around the world are incorporating the Web and other Internet-based technologies into their programs and business. More than 650 people from 27 countries attended. (Other stats here.)

There were awards offered, too: of note was this one category, the Best of the Web (Education) award was given to The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr., an offering by The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and College of Education’s Technology & Education Center (TEC) at the University of New Mexico. The very Best of the Web was Launchball of the Science Museum, London. (Beware, this is the very epitome of a timewaster, I lost a few hours somehow after logging onto that for the first time.) The list of awardees is here.

There was so much discussed at the conference that I've been overwhelmed with trying to offer some wayposts to our eight or nine readers who might be interested in learning more about the topics discussed. So, I was glad to run across this post by one Bryan Kennedy from the Science Museum of Minnesota, who wrote on the Museum 2.0 blog. Take special note of a few of the links he offers: the backchannel that was prevalent at times during the conference, for instance.

And what a comment that makes, in an of itself: A conference about the Web used the Web to enrich the experience, in real time, using Twitter, individual blogs, Flickr, whatever else was handy.

There's a lot more, and I could go on about it for a while longer, and I might add to this or post some more later on this topic. For now, I encourage you to check out this conference Web site, which features blogs written before, during and after the meeting. There are links there to search the conference papers, too, which are worth perusing if time allows, and how to find presenters' slides and handouts.

Cool Dissection Atlas Profiled

Morbid Anatomy linked to a New York Times article today, which I circulated around the office today - a feature on the Bassett Stereoscopic Dissection Collection (watch their video, too, of which I am very jealous!). And to add to the flurry of links, check out this Flickr stream and this article from Stanford. Very cool stuff. I, for one, would love to check out some of those View-masters.

St. Elizabeth's Calvarium - Dr. I.W. Blackburn

A good day at the museum is rediscovering the history of a specimen or artifact that has lost its association with the record that tells us who, where and why it has come to the museum. Sometimes it takes archival research to do this and sometimes it's purely serendipitous.

This weekend I discovered a copy of "Intracranial Tumors Among the Insane (1902) by Dr. I. W. Blackburn in a used bookstore in Gaithersburg, MD. Dr. Blackburn was the former pathologist for St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. He performed hundreds maybe thousands of autopsies on patients who died at the hospital. While browsing through the book I noticed a photo of very unique calvarium (top of the skull). The specimen had two rare conditions; scaphocephaly and hyperostosis frontalis interna. The bone looked strangely familiar.

In the Anatomical Division of NMHM we have such a specimen. It was listed as coming to the museum from an early exchange with the Smithsonian National Museum and not attributed to St. Elizabeth's at all. I bought the book for $15 and lo and behold when I brought it back to the museum our specimen was the same one in the book. It was attributed to a 65 year old black female patient at St. Es. The existing record was based on a bygone curatorial staff member using the wrong numbering system to describe the specimen. There have been several systems in place at the museum at various times which causes a lot of confusion for us today.

Here is a recent photo of the specimen. In addition to the pathological conditions there are also consistencies among the size and shape of the exposed frontal sinus, the etchings of the meningeal vessels, the contours of the thickened frontal bone and the two small bony exostoses in the center just left of the midline. The front of the skull is oriented to the right.

The specimen's history is now restored. Additionally, four other calvaria in the collection with no known history have similarly composed autopsy numbers written on the bones. All are now believed to be from St. Elizabeth's with further research pending. These specimens have very early accession numbers which means that they arrived at the museum around 1917-1918 when the Army Medical Museum was busy attending to the medical needs of World War I. It is not clear when the original error was made, but it likely extends back several decades. The specimens themselves are from the late 19th century autopsies.

In the photo below you can see the scaphocephalic calvarium (left) next to a normal one (right). Notice that the normal one on the right has a jagged line called the sagittal suture (front to back) which the one on the left lacks. Sutures are where the bones of the cranium grow and expand. In scaphocephaly the sagittal suture fuses prematurely and the coronal suture continues to grow which gives the unique elongated shape you see here. The one on the left is darker due to over 100 years of dust and dirt adhering to oils that remained in the bone. Since bone is porous, it can absorb materials from the environment which effect its color. The one on the right was cleaned using chemicals that removed much of the oils and was stored in a relatively cleaner environment.

Civil War photos from Museum on display in Smithsonian

Toby Jurovics, a curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, borrowed some William Bell pictures from us last year. Bell's work is often confused with the more famous Matthew Brady. They're on display in a small gallery of Civil War photos, along with more famous pictures by Gardener and Sullivan.

Here's roughly how they look although I should have turned the flash off:

National Health Museum

The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the "National Health Museum," which doesn't exist except as a website, is now looking beyond Washington for a home. The NHM was established in 1988 as the National Museum of Health & Medicine Foundation, but eventually decided in the early 1990s that they didn't want to be affiliated with the existing medical museum anymore and went on their own. So in two decades, they've created a website and now are looking to move out of DC - "After a 10-month search, he said Atlanta remains in the running with Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Museum officials will announce a selection later this year, [Mark Dunham] said."

See "National health museum might call Atlanta home," by CRAIG SCHNEIDER. Published on: 03/26/08. Thanks to Jen Heilman for the tip.

Library of Congress has a blog now too!

The Library of Congress has a blog now too! And they're posting Hitler's Treasures there, but I'm noting it just to say - we were here first! Their blog is by Matt Raymond, one of their PR guys apparently.